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#275
Hi there,
Daniel here — Swedish startup Veat just filed for bankruptcy. I was an advisor from the get-go, when Veat started out back in 2020. The startup served fresh, plant-centric grab-and-go foods via vending machines and fridges at around 80 locations in Stockholm.
Veat’s CEO/Founder Andreas Karlsson shared some learnings and reflections from his journey that I think could be helpful to other founders.
This week's rundown:
💰 Ripple Foods raises $17M for allergen-free, plant-based milk products
🇮🇳 Moonrider secures $6M for its electric tractor tech.
🥀 Ÿnsect formally liquidated after raising $500M+
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FUNDING
Seaweed boom: Sweden grows it, Australia feeds it to cows to cut methane
🇮🇳 AgroStar, $30m smallholder agricultural solutions provider in India. Investors: Just Climate and earlier investors.
🇬🇧 BSF Enterprise, £15M ($20M), cultivated meat (thru subsidiary 3D Bio-Tissues). Investors: Blackstone Mercantile Group.
🇺🇸 Ripple Foods, $17M: New allergen-free, plant-based milk products and retail expansion. Investors: Material Impact and Rich Products Ventures.
🇺🇸 Appetronix, $10M, high-traffic kitchen robotics. Investors: Grote family and AlleyCorp.
🇮🇳 Moonrider, $6M, electric tractor tech. Investors: pi Ventures, Singularity AMC, Advantedge Founders, and Micelio Fund.
🇫🇷 Veragrow, €4.5M ($5.2M), agricultural biostimulants. Investors: ODYSSEE Venture, Normandie Participations, Caisse d'Epargne Normandie and ALL SUN.
🇸🇪 Nordic Seafarm, €1.8M ($2.1M), cultivating seaweed in nutritious Swedish waters. Undisclosed existing and new investors.
🇦🇺 Freemantle Seaweed, AUS $2.2M ($1.4M), cattle methane emissions cutting using seaweed. Investors: Crowdfunding campaign.
🇦🇺 Drone-Hand, $720K, autonomous offline livestock management platform, using drones and machine learning to monitor animal location, health, water, and fences. Investors: Radius Capital (h/t FoodHack).
INVESTMENT CLIMATE PODCAST
Gavin Schneider of Maia Farms on how to get funded in 2025
This week, Alex Shandrovsky met with Gavin Schneider, CEO and co-founder of Maia Farms, which provides food producers with versatile, scalable solutions that outperform soy and mold-based alternatives. Maia recently raised $6.5M from Protein Industries Canada and Greater Vancouver Food Bank (GVFB) as investors.
The conversation can be found on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Top three findings from this conversation:
Your Lead Investor Might Not Be on Your Original List. Gavin’s lead investor came via a warm intro from a larger fund that ultimately passed on Maia as “too early”—but then made the perfect connection to a local Vancouver climate-focused fund. “So they made an introduction to another group, and things actually happened in quite rapid progression from the time of introduction to closing the deal, and it happened within a matter of weeks. You never know who will get you where you need to go.”
A Simple, Thoughtful Data Room Beats Fancy Software. For this round, Maia ditched expensive data-room platforms and ran everything through Google Drive, using its newer security features plus a clear structure and “checklist” mindset. Gavin stress-tested the data room with incubator mentors and updated it continuously based on investor objections, treating every “no” as an input to improve the next investor’s experience. “If you’re already paying for [Google], I think that groups that are paying an extra $1,500 for a specialized data room… you’re able to get to the same result and the same level of security today with Google Drive. Follow your standard checklists… and ask yourself as you’re going through it: if I were interrogating this company, what pieces of information would I also like to see here?”
Valuation, Geography, and Reframing Dilution. Adam says the strongest CEOs today are ruthlessly narrowing scope, cutting burn, and focusing on a small number of milestones that can unlock revenue or strategic partnerships. The “go-big-go-fast” era is dead; survival now requires laser focus. “Valuations for American groups are vastly different from what a Canadian company, an Israeli company, a South Korean company, or a Singapore company will achieve. A lot of people… fear dilution… but it actually means that people believe in your company and your vision and they want to take a risk.”
NOTEWORTHY
Umeå cuts waste, Bettani Farms cuts in to acquire three startups
📉 The Swedish municipality of Umeå (population 130K) has cut food waste by over 30% — or 18 metric tons — using an innovative algorithm that predicts student attendance and helps school canteens prepare the right amount of food (Sweden has universal school lunch programs.)
🪦 French insect-as-protein pioneer Ÿnsect, which had raised more than $500M before declaring insolvency in 2024, has been judicially liquidated by a commercial court.
🐮 RespectFarms launches the “world’s first cultivated meat farm” in the Netherlands.
🧀 Bettani Farms (formerly Climax Foods) has acquired the IP of defunct plant-based cheese companies Stockeld Dreamery and Numu, and plant-meat maker Hungry Planet.
🌴 Can palm oil ever be replaced — and should it?
💡Finnish food tech company Happy Plant Protein is set to debut its first textured vegetable protein (TVP) made from faba beans. The company claims it’s important because the new vegetable protein replaces expensive, resource-intensive protein isolate production with a cheaper, cleaner, local, scalable method — solving taste, cost, and sustainability challenges in one step.
❓Should we stop talking about “ultra processed” foods, and instead start talking about “ultra formulated” foods?
NEWS FROM THE FTW COMMUNITY
Want to work with investing in AgriHealth?
👨🏻💻 The First Thirty (🇬🇧) is hiring an Investment Associate.
🌍 Bright Green Partners just released its 2026 FoodTech Trends report, drawing on insights from 2,500 FoodTech exports, on the forces, technologies, and market shifts shaping the FoodTech landscape in the coming year.
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RANDOM STUFF
Vending-machine scallops and lickable gift wrap: Europe’s food innovation energy is… strong.
😏 The foods that make you smell more attractive.
🐌 Some 450 kgs of snails, at a $100K value, were stolen from French snail farmer L’Escargot Des Grands Crus last week. The family business, which breeds around 350K snails annually, is now struggling to replenish its stock in time for the busy holiday season.
🚕 Self-driving taxi company Waymo is now doing 1 million rides per month in California, a 3x increase over the past year and a 26x increase over the past two years.
Source: Charlie Bilello
🐚 Vending machine scallops has proven to be a big hit in the town of Hillion, France.
👅 Ahead of the Christmas season, Aldi UK has launched lickable pigs-in-blankets-flavored wrapping paper (h/t FoodHack).
✈️ How airlines exploit their own customers.
We love you.
Daniel & Ilkka
- - -
🎵 This issue was produced while listening to Telling Stories by Tracy Chapman.
THE LEFTOVERS
Written by Daniel Skavén Ruben and Ilkka Taponen.
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THE LEFTOVERS
Written by Daniel Skavén Ruben and Ilkka Taponen.
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